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SUMMER MOVIES; Those Strangers on a Train, Nine Years Later

''BEFORE SUNRISE,'' Richard Linklater's charming 1995 comedy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, ended with a promise: the two characters, Jesse and Celine, would meet in Vienna six months later to continue the romance that began with a chance meeting on a train. Only a modest success at the time of its release, the film has become a dorm-room classic (much like Mr. Linklater's first two films, ''Slacker'' and ''Dazed and Confused'') with its portrait of reluctant adults torn between the cynicism of the day and the romance of their youth. Now Mr. Linklater, Ms. Delpy and Mr. Hawke have collaborated on ''Before Sunset,'' which picks up the story nine years later when Jesse and Celine meet at a Paris bookstore where Jesse is promoting his first novel, based on the night they spent together. The three share screenwriting credit on the film, which is dialogue heavy and packed with stirring monologues and grown-up revelations. In March, ''Before Sunset'' played at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Mr. Linklater's hometown. He joined Ms. Delpy and Mr. Hawke to talk with Sarah Hepola about their collaboration.

SARAH HEPOLA -- This is the kind of project that people talk about doing a lot. When did you decide to actually do it?

ETHAN HAWKE -- It was about a year after. We were all in L.A. We had a breakfast or something. It was in the air pretty early.

It's just so rare that a sequel doesn't come out in the next year or two after the first one. But the first one wasn't a big success or anything. So there was no economic motivation.

LINKLATER -- It's one of those that kind of sneaks up. It's funny how films have their economic life in that window when they come out. Our film was weird. There wasn't a lot of music in it. It wasn't MTV-style. It had nothing to do with the pop culture moment. There were no references to anything. It was just two people.

HEPOLA -- Why did it take so many years to return to Jesse and Celine?

LINKLATER -- It took us that long to come up with the right idea. And as more time went by, it changed how we could write it. You know, the original idea of the sequel was to do it six months later. Well, nine years went by and we didn't make the six-months-later version, so we had to come up with a new version of what happened.

HEPOLA -- There's a scene in the movie where Jesse is sort of pressed by journalists and fans about how his story turned out. Was that an experience that the three of you had after ''Before Sunrise''?

JULIE DELPY -- I think, yeah.

HAWKE -- Everybody did. That was the question.

LINKLATER -- It was the question.

DELPY -- ''What happens to them?''

HEPOLA -- And how did you respond to that?

LINKLATER -- I responded to it the same way he does in the movie. I always said that the movie was a litmus test for how you view romance. Some people would go: ''It's so clear. They will never get back together.'' People were so sure. Based on their own ----

DELPY -- Their romantic history.

LINKLATER -- History, yeah. So I just kind of thought it was -- I always thought they did get back together. So I always thought they would.

HEPOLA -- What did you two think?

DELPY -- I thought they would.

HAWKE -- I always thought they would. [To Delpy] I knew you would come back.

DELPY -- Yeah, at first. Cosmologist I thought was interesting because I love science. And you have to be passionate to do that. After a while I got more and more involved with friends of mine that were activists. And I was like, O.K., she's going to have to be an activist, because it's going to be so easy for me to write this -- I can just take from people I spend all day with every day of my life.

HEPOLA -- [To Hawke] And of course your character has written books.

HAWKE -- Yeah. That idea spawned out of Rick coming to a reading of mine.

LINKLATER -- Yeah. I introduced you at a reading here. It seemed like a good kickoff. Such a fun way for them to meet again.

LINKLATER -- You know, the very first movie was made -- I mean, my acorn of an idea way back then was, I met this woman in Philadelphia. And we spent a night walking around. And it was great. And I was thinking, ''This could be a movie.'' Filmmaker's curse. I'm walking around going, ''If I could just capture this feeling I'm having right now,'' instead of actually having that feeling. But I always thought maybe she would show up at a ''Before Sunrise'' screening or something. She never did. But I always expected, ''Oh, hi, I'm Amy. Remember me?'' It would be so weird.

HEPOLA -- So getting back to the three days that you spent writing. If you could just tell me about how that happened. You just sit around talking?

HAWKE -- We just goof off a lot. We play music and we talk. We talk about life. And we ----

LINKLATER -- You show up with ideas. You go, O.K., it's going to happen in real time.

HAWKE -- Yeah, you can't have too serious a conversation when you first meet. You have to have more of a flirty dialogue. O.K. Then you're going to talk about politics or something that isn't personal, but ----

LINKLATER -- But you're expressing who you are.

HAWKE -- Yeah, basically trying to seduce each other with how interesting their ideas are, but without coming on to each other.

DELPY -- It's flirting without flirting.

HAWKE -- And then you're going to have to take it to the next level, where you actually talk about something personal.

DELPY -- Kidding around about sex.

HAWKE -- Yeah, that's right, then the flirtation turns into sexual dialogue. Then you've got to dig even deeper and say something really personal. And then you can make love.

LINKLATER -- What happened is, we could start setting up this basic outline. And then we would just talk. And then we would leave it for six months.

HAWKE -- Julie was writing volumes. And I was writing monologues for my character. And Rick was assembling all this stuff and writing a bunch of stuff himself.

LINKLATER -- It was a first draft, we could say. Then we got together in Paris.

HAWKE -- It was enough to get the money together for the movie.

HEPOLA -- [To Hawke] At one point your character says that people don't change. But there are certain things that did change about these two. In some ways, they've switched roles.

DELPY -- She was the romantic, the one who wanted more of a relationship.

HAWKE -- In the first one, yeah. He's more cynical in the first one, yeah.

DELPY -- I think it's because she was so romantic in the first film, she probably got hurt maybe more than he had.

HAWKE -- And because he was so cynical, he's now looking for meaning. That whole thing about that idea of people changing or not changing is kind of interesting. I don't think they were that different. It's like when a baby is born -- I just noticed this with my own daughter. You look at a picture of a kid when they're 9 months old and you look at a picture of them when they're 7 or something. And you say it looks like her. But when they're 9 months old, you don't know what are the parts of them that are going to be consistent and which are going to go away. It always looks like the same person. But you can't identify which ones are the center. You know? People do change and they don't change.

DELPY -- People get tougher and this and that. But I always think, like I say in the film, reading a journal from when you're a kid, what you are deep inside, the way you sense things, the way you sense the outside world and the way you analyze it, will always stay the same.

HEPOLA -- I'm curious what you think when you see yourself in the earlier film.

HAWKE -- It was surprising. You see these cuts of the first movie and you're like, ''Wow.'' Because you feel like the same person, you know? But you look at it and you go, ''I was really a kid, man.''

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A version of this interview appears in print on May 9, 2004, on Page A2 of the National edition with the headline: SUMMER MOVIES; Those Strangers on a Train, Nine Years Later. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe